Thursday, February 26, 2015

Looking into my mouth microbiome

The gut biome is interesting enough, but bacteria colonize just about every part of the body, so recently I’ve been studying my uBiome mouth test results. The simple GitHub RuBiome utilities I use for analyzing my gut will work for that too, so here’s a short example of how I did it:

S. sanguinis is a normal inhabitant of the healthy human mouth where it is particularly found in dental plaque, where it modifies the environment to make it less hospitable for other strains of Streptococcus that cause cavities, such as Streptococcus mutans.

No cavities? Nice! More good news: this quick check confirms that I don’t have any S. mutans:

...which is a scientific gobbleygook way of saying nobody has a clue. All the more reason to keep testing, submitting, and getting more data. I just sent two more kits to uBiome, and will let you know more as soon as I get back the results.